Hyperlinks are widely used in documents of all types, and in particular in Internet documents, to provide easy access to additional information. The hyperlinks can provide access not only to other documents or Universal Resource Locators (URLs) but also to pop-up boxes with translations, audio pronunciation, image or video description and other sources of information directly related to the highlighted text.
Visual formatting cues such as text color, background color, font, or font characteristics are used to distinguish a hyperlink from its surrounding text. Information associated with the hyperlink, hidden from the user, provides the formatting information for the hyperlink. In standard markup language practice, the formatting information is not directly provided for each hyperlink separately. Each hyperlink is assigned a style attribute. In HTML (hypertext markup language) documents, the particular formatting used for a style is typically defined in separate “style sheet” documents. The style sheet defines a basic, default formatting style, and then defines a tree hierarchy of additional formatting styles. The default style is at the root of the tree, and each of the leaves represents a specific child style. Branching points within the tree define families of formatting styles.
Formatting for Extended Markup Language (XML) documents is specified in a separate style sheet written in Extensible Style Sheet Language (XSL). XSL style sheets contain formatting information, and also include rules for translating elements from XML to other formats according to the Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation (XSLT) standard. A particular XSL document may specify the conversion of a XML document to HTML, while another can specify the conversion of the XML document into an address book application database.
Emerging technologies expand the definition of hyperlinks and style attributes to allow one-to-many links. A particular XML element can be linked to many other elements. Clicking on the hyperlink opens a pop-up list of resources associated with the link. Richlink (see www.richlink.com) markets such a system for use by content authors. Clicking on a Richlink hyperlink displays another HTML page in a smaller window, complete with images, text, and more hyperlinks. Xlink (see www.w3c.org/xlink), a markup-language specification that has been adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), provides a standardized method of specifying the one-to-many relationships utilizing beginning points, end points and arcs.
Although hyperlinks enrich the content of a document, they can also interfere with the natural cadence of user interaction with the document. At each link the user must decide whether to pursue the hyperlink or ignore it. Documents that use one-to-many hyperlinks further distract the user by displaying a multitude of resources associated with a hyperlink concept in the document. The situation is exacerbated by certain systems that automatically annotate text by converting almost any phrase in it to a hyperlink, and by linking one phrase in the text to more than one target.
The prior art contains various methods and systems for dynamically adding link content to Web pages and other documents. Systems and methods also exist to dynamically modify link characteristics, adding icons or changing link colors and fonts.
One such method is described by Barrett et al., in “How to Personalize the Web,” published in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI '97 (ACM Press, New York, 1997), which is incorporated herein by reference. The authors describe a system called Web Browser Intelligence (WBI), which organizes agents on a user's workstation to perform functions that include modifying Web documents to provide additional information to the user. One agent function is to annotate hyperlinks with network speed information, using what the authors call “Web traffic lights.” For each of the hyperlinks on a given Web page, a generator agent maintains and updates a database of network delays to the respective server to which the hyperlink leads. An editor agent adds small in-line images around each of the hyperlinks appearing on the page, which are displayed as colored dots that indicate the speed of the corresponding network link. The traffic lights thus give the user an indication of the delay to be expected if one or another of the hyperlinks is selected.
Another approach is described by Stanyer et al., in “Improving Web Usability with the Link Lens,” presented at the Eighth International World Wide Web Conference (Toronto, May, 1999, proceedings published by Elsevier Science B. V.). The authors' “Link Lens” presents the user with meta-data regarding documents that are available for download over various links. The meta-data include a predicted transfer time for the document, based on the size of the document and the quality of service on the connection over which the link is to be made. The meta-data are presented on the user's computer screen in a movable “Magic Lens” window, which is superimposed on the Web page that is currently displayed on the screen. The window for a given link opens when the user passes the cursor over an “anchor” (such as a hot button) corresponding to the link.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,708,825, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method and apparatus to enable scanning one or more documents, automatically identifying significant key topics, concepts and phrases in the documents, and creating summary pages for, and hyperlinks between, some or all of these key topics.
All of these inventions are used to create additional hyperlinks in a displayed document or to modify the hyperlink appearance, but none of them allow the user to remove or control the visual clutter caused by too many hyperlinks in a document.